NOAA readjustment of global temperatures backed by new study

A new study is backing the decision from NOAA to readjust its global temperature dataset.

By Jason Spencer |
Jan 04, 2017

A new study is backing the decision from NOAA to readjust its global temperature dataset.

The U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration adjusted statistical data that before now had suggested that the threat of global warming may not be as bad as advertised. NOAA takesdata on the temperature of the oceans through ship engine rooms and buoys but in 2015, decided to adjust its estimation of the temperature on Earth to reflect the warmer numbers suggested by the ship engine room statistics as opposed to those recorded through the buoys. In a paper that was greatly criticized and highly controversial, NOAA essentially discredited an argument of global warming skeptics that since a record breaking year in 1998 global warming has paused or plateaued. With their new dataset, NOAA and head author, Thomas Karl, suggested that there had been no slow down in the rate of the warming of the planet.

A new study, which was published inScience Advances on Wednesday, found that NOAA was correct to readjust its dataset. The new study, "Assessing recent warming using instrumentally homogeneous sea surface temperature records", supported NOAA in adjusting the datasets because of the biases in the observing systems aforementioned. The study also suggested that other global temperature record keepers should do the same.

"We pretty robustly showed that NOAA got it right," said study author Zeke Hausfather, a Ph.D. student at the University of California-Berkeley. Hausfather is a researcher withBerkeley Earth, a nonprofit consortium that analyzesthe Earth's temperatures. "There was no cooking of the books, there's no politically motivated twisting of the data."

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